Notes from my Knapsack 1-17-19
Jeff Gill
Might as well face it
___
Robert Palmer suggested that we could, in fact, be addicted to love. Or maybe he didn't mean it as a general statement, but we might as well face it: addictions are not uncommon.
I've been involved for some time now with the Licking County Addictions Task Force, and if you think that doesn't include Granville, I suggest you do an online search for a video about Denial, Ohio (which looks awfully familiar on the screen). View the full 55 second version.
Opioids have gotten the headlines and the major media attention through books like "Dreamland" by Sam Quinones, which starts and ends in Portsmouth, Ohio and features Chillicothe and Columbus; Elaine McMillion Sheldon, who has been brought to our area a few times by our own Jack Shuler, has made a striking short documentary that you can see on Netflix titled "Heroin(e)" which in forty minutes follows three women around Huntington, West Virginia that's about the same size as Newark & Heath and in many lights looks the same (if you're really pressed for time, watch the music video she did for John Prine's "Summer's End").
But our local scourge has tended to be meth, which Jack has described in searing detail for a piece in the new January/February "Pacific Standard" which you can also find online. Many in our county have banded together to try to deal with a wave of fentanyl-related overdoses, and the ongoing addiction problems these situations have inadvertently helped reveal more generally. It's wide, it's deep, and it's often multi-substance use and abuse.
I've been asked repeatedly versions of a perfectly reasonable question: "why do addicts use drugs, anyhow?" The point being that if we can figure out what's become so intolerable about modern life that it makes drugs attractive, then if we address that we eliminate the demand side of the equation . . . because the war on the supply side of the drug problem doesn't seem to have worked.
For what it's worth, part of my response would be -- Why did Vikings drink copious amounts of mead? Why did Malay pirates incessantly chew khat? Why did Soviet era leaders let alone kulaks before them drink vodka to the point of insensibility? To some degree, this is a human universal, and the interesting question is "what happens when people choose to live otherwise?"
Or closer to home: why did Austrian glassblowers after migrating to Newark, Ohio drink Morath Brewery beer in mass quantities after they left the Heisey Glass plant? Or why former Baden-Wurttemberg residents in large numbers at Union and W. Main and 11th St. pour gallons into their steins before coming home from the Wehrle stove works?
I think the focus can also be usefully put, as Jack has tried to do, on those who successfully navigate recovery, and to ask "how do you live a fulfilling life without mood-altering substances?" Because there are answers to that question out there, and I think those successes are worth pursuing and interrogating. I encourage you to find his article online, and start thinking about your own answers to that question.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he really hopes you'll read Jack Shuler's articles. Tell Jeff what you think about addiction in Our Fayre Village at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
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